(By Loyd Ford) The best Hollywood directors are amazing storytellers. Their jobs begin with understanding the story they want to tell, doing the work on the first day of shooting, and creating a believable world with a story people can’t turn away from. After all, movie directors are sellers. Or didn’t you know?
You’re the director of your own movie. That movie is your regular sales process. Prospecting and client cultivation should provide solutions for your clients, revenue growth for your company, and help grow your personal income. That’s a lot of motivation for learning to use storytelling to increase your sales.
As a seller, your revenue will rise when you learn that controlling the narrative gives you an elevated opportunity to close more sales. More than this, sellers should spend time learning how to use storytelling to connect and build relationships. This is one of the most powerful tools you can have at the ready to create opportunity.
Let’s prove our point:
- The best salespeople learn how to tell stories to draw people to them. To effectively build a relationship with someone important, you must first gain access to their attention. Just showing up for a pitch isn’t enough.
- The best stories begin with proper prep. Anyone who wants to be a great storyteller but fails to prep is overwhelmingly likely to fail at achieving the goals associated with storytelling (including successfully capturing attention or even being liked by the prospect). Proper prep is essential.
- One of the most important aspects of using storytelling in sales is making certain you have purpose attached to the story. The biggest mistake most people make with storytelling is to misunderstand that a purpose is necessary. Telling a story without a purpose is only telling a story. You want to learn to master storytelling to move a prospect toward you and close the sale.
- The sales process itself is a story. The question for you to consider is if you can control the story or make it easier for clients to follow the path that ends in their sharing money to buy your solution. Ultimately this is regularly placing the prospect in a story where they become more successful because of your solution to a problem they need fixed.
- When thinking about all this storytelling and purposeful relationship-building, don’t forget your bosses. Better opportunities await when you learn to control the narrative with your bosses and craft opportunities for yourself.
Laugh if you want. The best salespeople throughout history have been storytellers. Remember those Hollywood directors we talked about earlier? They are such great storytellers that they often get millions of dollars in financing so they can make movies for a living.
Who said sales wasn’t fun?
Loyd Ford is president and chief strategic officer at Rainmaker Pathway Consulting Works (RPC). They help local radio with ratings and revenue. Reach him anytime at 864.448.4169 or [email protected]. Read Loyd’s Radio Ink archives here.
